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…the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. – “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill January 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Now if only George Bush and his bunch of ‘yee-ha’ cowboys in Washington could only read this Perhaps they would think twice before they go stomping off round the world to try to kill ‘terrorists’ January 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
When Jorg Heider’s Nationalist anti-EU party gained a small role in the Austrian government a while ago, the EU was so shocked that they actually imposed various diplomatic sanctions on Austria. Not surprisingly this caused an entirely understandable and entirely predictable upsurge in anti-EU sentiments in Austria from people resentful of crass interference in their own internal affairs. But I have always though it ironic that this should have happened to Austria. In Bosnia- Herzegovina the EU has its own political gauleiter called the ‘High Representative’, namely Austrian Wolfgang Petritsch. Although his job is to implement the Dayton Peace Agreements, he has never really hidden his true objective. He has often said that Bosnia-Herzegovina must follow the same route as other countries in the region towards European Union membership. Similarly we are told how important the introduction of democratic institutions are for ‘stability’ in the region. Yet when the largest Croat political party in Bosnia, the HDZ-BiH, representing largest single bloc of Croat votes, dares to use its democratic mandate to oppose the will of both the EU and the socialists in Sarajevo, our Austrian ruler sends in NATO troops last April to seize Hercegovacka Banka, the bank used by the HDZ for its funds. Democratic politics is fine it seems, just so long as it does not actually do anything that displeases the EU. One does not have to be a supporter of the HDZ (and I am not) to be horrified. So it is hardly surprising to me that various members of the EU elite across ‘unified’ Europe are expressing ‘concern’ and demands for ‘explanations’ why pro-superstatist Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero has been forced to resign from Silvio Berlusconi‘s government in Rome. The Spanish President of the EU Josep Picqué and Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel are going to deliver a report on this ‘situation’ in Italy. It seems they genuinely feel they must have some say in who is and is not in the Italian government, just as they felt towards Austria. I have no doubt that if Italy was not one of the larger EU nations that people in Brussels would not be at least making contingency plans for ‘special action’ if the grip of the EU started to seriously deteriorate in Italy (a remote possibility at best, to be frank). It is only a matter of time before even the smallest twitch of independent thinking from the elected representatives of an EU ‘nation’ (province) produces increasingly severe responses from the stasis superstatists. I wonder what bank Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia Political party keeps its money in? However if you want to see a glimpse of the true future of ‘democratic’ Europe, don’t look at Italy or Austria, look at post-war ‘democratic’ Bosnia-Herzegovina. January 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Lots of good but wrong stuff… …In Kevin Holtsberry’s blog. I would like to join battle with the redoubtable Mr Holtsberry on several issues, but can I start with just this one. I am as he is of sick of e-mails headed “heya…” and “hi?” that turn out to be porn. These e-mails disgust me when I see them, waste my time while I delete them, and mean that my children cannot be let out even for a moment from the kiddie-ghetto of Kids’ AOL. I don’t deny there is a problem. His proposed solution is to have a law. I have to point out that there probably are laws already, dozens of them. How long does a new one take to come in? How effective will enforcement be? Is there any special reason to suppose that it will be any more effective than the laws prohibiting drugs? Slowly, imperfectly, but definitely, the market has provided solutions to related problems before. We first hooked up to Compuserve in 1995. At that time you paid for every message you received. We received a lot of junk, got sick of it, and quit. (Our family would be classified in advertiser’s jargon as not so much “early adopters” as “early rejecters”.) When we came back five years later the payment structure problem had been solved, and the quantity of junk mail much decreased. (Yes, really.) It’s an arms race. At the moment the attackers are winning – but who is going to be more motivated to research on means of defence: AOL, who are going to lose my custom one of these fine days if they don’t get a move on, or the government? It’s not the case that I deny any role for law in this issue. Separate contracts, enforceable in law, between ISP and users as to what could and could not be sent by the ISP’s services, would be fine by me. Different ISP’s could compete on their various brand contracts. “We always prosecute pornographers who send unsolicited mail!” some would boast. Others could proudly say, “You choose: this service is completely unrestricted and unsupervised.” Contrast that with the obvious dangers of blanket supervision by not just the present government but all future ones. But the law is always likely to trail behind the power of angry customers (like me) with the right of exit. The lowlife that Mr Holtsberry rightly describes as being “creative and dishonest” in evading the software barriers that Internet Service Providers try to put up against them are scarcely likely to be less creative and more honest in evading legal barriers. January 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Another report from the front lines of socialist-land from the student hiding behind the “pixilated burqa of on-line anonymity” I love the “logic” of the majority of my fellow students. They “hate” taxes and love big government programs. Hypocritical? Yes, but it gets so much better than it might appear at first glance. One tax they hate the most is the sales tax on text books. Now a 3.7%+ tax can add a bit to the bill when an average bill is over $200. While understandable, the student legislature has a weird solution to this problem: ban sales taxes on campus. Now while I love the thought of banning taxes all together (I am a Libertarian after all), I find it hypocritical that they also call for big government. If they (the supporters of this big government) don’t pay for it, then who do they think will? The hypocrisy is unbelievable. You pay for what you advocate. These student bureaucrats, oh I am sorry student legislators, apparently have some problem with sales taxes. I hardly doubt that it is the same problem I have. My problem is that it takes money from people and spends it on horrid and wasteful government programs that violate the very nature of the US Constitution. (This is true with me of all taxes.) Unlike me, their problem is that sales taxes are more visible to them than payroll taxes and income taxes (they’re wards of Mummy and Pappy and don’t need jobs). In my opinion, sales taxes are the best of all the evil taxes available. As sales taxes are the least unfair because it is harder for the politicians to politicize them. With income taxes they can change the rates so that the rich get screwed and the poor get helped. That is exactly what we have right now in America (the majority of taxpayers are rich paying for the poor – the minority of people paying for the majority of people because of the tax structure). The student legislatures (who really dislike me, by the way) really do not care about the payroll taxes or other forms of income taxes that their fellow working students (the minority of students need you be told) have to pay Let us pretend for a minute that I am mistaken: they just dislike all taxes, not just the visible ones. Assuming that this is true, and it is not, they are clearly fighting the wrong battle. Want to reduce taxes? First reduce the government, then taxes will follow as spending will decrease then all politicians will have nothing left to do with the money except return it. However, I highly doubt that this is what they think, as they suffer from the liberal’s contagious cancer that encourages a pro-tax bias. There are two other reasons why I know this is not the case. First, they want to eradicate taxes in just the bookstore, not in nearby restaurants and stores. Dare I say that this may be, in some twisted way, a political move of these future bureaucrats? I also know this because they like to see the government doing things: education, health care, energy, environmental protection, euro-creation, food distribution, retirement provisions, and whatever else. In other words, they have no problem with people paying 100% taxes, if that is what it takes to have these utopia-based government programs. Furthermore, they dislike any mention of broad scoping tax cuts, even the petty cuts proposed by the president and the governor of whatever state I happen to be in. The idea of anti-taxes is not bad, but that is clearly not what they really believe. They just want to save their political hides by not having on campus taxes. Like all politicians, these student politicians also see the need to eradicate visible taxes from those they represent. At least if their hearts were really against taxes I may not be so displeased with their decision, but as it stands, these politicians are operating at the same level of intelligence as Tom Daschle and Karl Marx. January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
More, that is, of high-handed Tory paternalism on display here in the Telegraph. The Tories are not a part of the solution, they are a part of the problem. Oh and by the by, would anyone like to bet that, in the event that the Tories got into power again, their Eurosceptic position would be jettisoned as well? January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Over on Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet, Cal makes a non-trivial observation pertaining to the much derided Cornel West rap album
Yes, that would seem a rather important prerequisite! Still, if an ‘artist’ can win the Turner Prize for Art without producing any art… January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It seems that the US media now have a new bugbear as the source of all teen miscreant behaviour: Osama Bin Laden. When a teenager (a loner, naturally) in Tampa crashed his airplane into the Bank of America building, the US media rushed to blame Bin Laden. No where has it been suggested that the usual suspects, heavy metal bands, were at fault. Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Rob Zombie are all off the hook. American has a new bugbear and he has a towel-wrapped around his head. Osama bin Laden does share one thing with his musician miscreants co-defendants, they all made really crap and disturbing videos. It seems the media was right one this one, a note was found praising Osama Bin Laden in the wreckage of the airplane, expressing sympathy for him and praising the events of the 9/11. What is more alarming is that the airplane was just trailed and allowed to crash into the skyscraper. It does seem rather daft to watch the airplane crash and do nothing. We are supposed to be re-assured by the fact that the airplane was followed all the way into the building and that there were two F15s scrambled. Surely the whole point of chasing the plane was to shoot it down? No doubt the Al Queda cells left in the world are studying this event closely. Fortunately the boy stole a pathetic little 2 seat airplane. This is proof, not that it is needed, that the Americans still have not grasped the danger of air based terror. NB: It is curious to note that some of the leading hard-core left wing bands in the US have kept very quiet since 9/11. There has been virtually not a hard-left peep from Rage Against the Machine, Zack la Rocha, Eddie Vedder or Chumbawumba. Andrew Ian Dodge “What Sucks? Statism Sucks!“ January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In Dale Amon‘s article about his libertarian road to Damascus, he quite correctly points out that we are neither left nor right. For this reason the path by which the Samizdata people came to our respective forms of hyphenated libertarianism is often quite different. Like Dale, Natalie Solent came to libertarianism from the left, in her case the overtly socialist British left (the ‘unequivocal left’ as I often call it). Although I do not know Natalie personally, we do have friends in common, one of whom I am dinning with tonight. However I read her blog daily and have seem many of her posts to an e-forum of which we are both members, thus I feel I have a very good idea of where she stands. Clearly socialism found her critically rational mind a poor place to set down roots. Natalija Radic, having grown up under communism and living under that system until 1991, came to libertarianism perhaps more directly via the ‘dissident’ route. Unlike many, she was never an ethnic nationalist but rather an anti-communist. As she once put it to me, “Libertarians were the only ones who actually had anything interesting to say about liberty, rather than just economy, and why true liberty requires true capitalism”. As I was one of the first self-described libertarians she ever met (in 1992), I take partial credit/blame for spurring her off in the overtly libertarian direction. However others on this forum have taken a vaguely similar path to me. David Carr and Tom Burroughes both have British Tory Party ‘history’. I too was very much one of ‘Thatcher’s children’, seeing her rise as nothing less than the start of a new Enlightenment. However my political background is very transatlantic (my mother was American, my father British). Back when I decided to go to university in the USA, I fell in with the inimitable Walter Uhlman via our mutual fascination with guns, interesting women and unusual beer (or was that unusual women and interesting beer…my memory is a little fuzzy there). We both moved in very ‘Reagan Republican’ circles, as did pretty much all our extended circle of friends. Most of that circle in the USA still are voting Republicans yet nearly all are at the emphatically libertarian end of the party. I think I can safely say Walter votes Republican these days for entirely negative reasons, i.e. they are the lesser of two evils. I recall seeing a pithy quote to the effect ‘The Republicans support Big Government whereas the Democrats support really big government’. This is certainly a view that would produce a grim nod of agreement from most of my Republican friends who regard voting Republican as a rear guard action to be done with little true enthusiasm. Unfortunately I do not see any point whatsoever for voting Conservative in the UK at the moment. Unless someone like Oliver Letwin gets control of the top echelon of the Party I am unlikely to change my mind even under the ‘lesser of two evils’ principle, not that Letwin is much to get excited about to put it mildly. Like many UK libertarians, I abandoned the Tory Party after Thatcher, who was in truth an actuator of liberty without being a libertarian herself, and I moved out of the political mainstream altogether. Certainly with the defeat of Michael Portillo in the leadership battle to succeed William Hague, any last fantasies that the Tory party might rediscover any affinity for liberty was harshly disabused. It definitely had a very radicalizing effect on me. My business background is in various aspects of international finance, though I am not doing that these days, and so it would be fair to say my attachment to capitalism began as self-evident axioms, like most practicing capitalists and serial entrepreneurs. Only later did I acquire deeper philosophical and theoretical understandings of a less intuitive and practicle nature. It was through this process that I think I began to see the glaring philosophical holes in conservative thought, with its largely intuitive underpinnings that sow the seeds of its own failure. When I read remarks by some conservatives that ‘libertarianism is a weaker form of conservatism’ I find it hard to keep a straight face and can only assume these people have done little more than timidly stick a tentative toe in the vast ocean of libertarian theories lying beyond the arid shores of the constitutional legalisms they mistake for society’s bedrock. Yet that is also why I see things differently to Dale. I don’t despise conservatives, at least not all of them. Where as I regard socialists (or ‘liberals’ to use the weird American euphemism) as entirely wrong, I regard some conservatives as half-right (no pun intended). January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
As I seem to have gotten some dander up on a previous post (for which I am utterly unrepentant), this may be a good time for me to discuss a more general topic: why Libertarians are no closer to the Right than to the Left. I’m not going to do this by writing a philosophical treatise but by describing a personal journey. I have been a Libertarian-writ-capitalized for almost as long as there has been a Libertarian Party. I missed the beginning by a few years and much regretted that lost chance to have voted for someone other than Jimmy Carter. I certainly would not have voted for a Republican (other than Goldwater but I was far too young then) under any circumstances, then or now, and most certainly not for one tainted by association with that most evil and dishonest of all 20th Century Presidents, Richard Milhouse Nixon. I was a libertarian from the time I was a young teenager, but there was no Party to associate myself with or to tell me that I was not the only one with beliefs about individual liberty. I admired Barry Goldwater greatly and respected his opinion that the Vietnam war should either be fought or not fought. This earned him an undeserved warmonger label and succeeded in electing the man whose name I was chanting in marches around the Pittsburgh Federal Building a few years later when I was one of the organizers of a Guerilla Theatre troop of the Yippy variety:
This was partly youthful nose-thumbing at holier than thou right wing bigots and partly a major dislike of the concept of draft slavery. I might add that our troop broke up because most of it was involved in a court house riot after their targetted arrest at a demonstration in front of Draft Board member Julius Steinsaper’s house. I was away for Easter and missed the fun. I use the word advisedly as quite a few of my friends went to the hospital with patches of hair ripped out, broken bones, you name it… and I think one policeman pulled a muscle in his back while beating someone and another whacked his own hand with a billy club. That part of our troop became “The Pittsburgh n”, where n equals some number I have long forgotten. In an earlier action we set up a baby doll in Mellon Square Park and offered passerby’s imaginary shots for a quarter. We were soon surrounded by about 20 or more police and police dogs; the street was blocked due to the number of police vehicles parked there while Pittsburgh’s finest debated whether we were violating a City or a State ordinance by carrying a toy Tommy Gun in public. Their boss finally came by, probably to find out why the rest of the city was denuded of police… he looked at the 6 of us with one toy tommy gun… he looked at the 20 some of well armed police surrounding us… he looked at us again… he looked at them, shook his head in disbelief and waved at us to just simply go away. I could not help the strains of “Alice’s Restaurant” going through my head. One cannot say I came away from the incidents above with a great deal of respect for the police and the State. That is not even to mention the busts of friends for grass, the busts of others with planted drugs, the newspaper reports about friends busts that listed items that turned out to be birth control pills and the like… Above all else, the 1960’s and early 70’s were a battle against an extremist right wing society that had no compunctions about the use of violence to suppress people. If you did not conform (and god help you if you were so nonconformist as to be black!) you were a Commie and the Enemy. This attitude in the government culminated in the Kent State murders of 1970. On the day it happened I was at an antiwar demonstration at which my girlfriend was tossed in the back of a Tactical Police van. You know the sort, the cops they keep in a cage and feed raw meat to. So I was not in the best of moods towards the evil state when I saw the news about the murders a few hours later. I and thousands of other students were ready to go out and bring down the government that night, and if anyone had truly had a clue there would have been a nationwide attempt at something foolish. Even as it was, the reaction was so large and so angry and so sustained that it was the turning point. The kids who died at Kent State very directly helped end the draft, the war and everything the Right wing stood for. Much of the New Left (ie the kids) in those days were profoundly non-statist. The by-word was “do your own thing”. Live and let live. Don’t enslave me to go fight your war for your reasons. But there was another element. The left may have been the flag around which we rallied, but the flagholders had their own agenda, and towards the end that agenda started to be foisted on us. I could probably do a bit of research and give you the precise day on which I parted company from them. A Senator from Ohio was speaking in Skibo ballroom (the CMU student union) and instead of asking about the war or some other “correct” issue, I asked about support for the Mars program. For those who don’t know, this was the post-Apollo time when Mars programs were still being discussed… just before the long knives came down and the remaining Saturn V’s became horizontal bird houses. After the talk, I was caught near one of the ballroom doors by one of my co-radicals, and a co-founder of CMU’s “Effete Snobs for Peace” (ESP). The exchange went something like this:
At which point I dropped all connection to campus radical organizations. John had done me the favour of explicating that the Left was as profoundly anti-liberty and anti-individualist as the Right. This left me politically homeless for some years. I worked hard, did theatre, played music, partook of the musicians holy rites of SD&RR and in general lived the life of a free man (one that would curl the hairs of a Right-Winger) and utterly ignored politics other than to wish as much ill as possible on Tricky Dicky during the Watergate hearings. Finally, in 1978 I ran across the Libertarian Party. I have voted straight party ever since. Or at least when I can get my absentee ballot sent over here, something which seems to be beyond the organizational capabilities of Allegheny County. So if I seem a bit harsh on Right Wingers… it is because I am and I simply don’t much care. I do not see them as any more of a fellow traveller than I do those on the left, and the left has much better parties and is a lot more fun to hang out with. January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I went into a small café in Zürich today and inadvertently tried to pay with Euro’s rather than Swiss Francs. The woman looked at me as though I had just handed her a dead mouse, then peered at the note, holding it in two fingers with her arm fully extended as if worried she might catch something. I snatched it back and handed her some Swiss Francs. She nodded and said “Much better… Euros are so ugly”. January 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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